John Timmer at ArsTechnica raises good questions about the study I pointed to on Saturday. Says Timmer: The results need to be interpreted very cautiously, as they were based on only 69 contributors from a single nation [Israel], a tiny drop in the Wikipedian ocean. … Wikipedia’s own survey of its contributors racked up roughly 12,000 original contributors (and another 32,000 sporadic contributors). Given that there were responses from about 400 Israelis, that survey probably included...

The White House blog notes the event will be streamed live at 4:25 EDT at WhiteHouse.gov/live. In the accompanying post, Deputy Director of the White House Office of Public Engagement Brian Bond writes: As a gay kid growing up in rural Missouri – I never thought I would end up helping to organize an LGBT Pride event in the White House.   Then again, I never thought I would ever realize my dream to work in the White House.  But thanks to the historic election of Barack Obama, today I am honored...

NYTimes: A federal judge sentenced Bernard L. Madoff to 150 years in prison on Monday for operating a huge Ponzi scheme that devastated thousands of people, calling his crimes “extraordinarily evil.” In pronouncing the sentence — the maximum he could have handed down — Judge Denny Chin turned aside Mr. Madoff’s own assertions of remorse and rejected the suggestion from Mr. Madoff’s lawyers that there was a sense of “mob vengeance” surrounding calls for a long prison term. “Objectively...

As expected: The Supreme Court has ruled in favor of white Connecticut firefighters in a 5-4 ruling that reverses an appeals court finding by Supreme Court nominee Sonia Sotomayor, the Associated Press report. The high court found that the firefighters in New Haven, Conn., were unfairly denied promotions because of their race, reversing a decision that Sotomayor endorsed as an appeals court judge. The AP story. The full text of the ruling. Kennedy wrote it. The breakdown is Alito, Kennedy, Scalia,...

Slide 11 from Wagner’s presentation. In the face of three government antitrust investigations, Google’s “senior competition counsel,” Dana Wagner, is trying to persuade the world that its competition is just a click away: [T]he boyish, 33-year-old Mr. Wagner [is] a former antitrust lawyer at the Justice Department who drops words like “goofy” and “whacky” with an aw-shucks grin into discussions of complex legal and economic issues. In contrast to Microsoft a decade ago, whose...

When I read Political Shifts on Gay Rights Lag Behind Culture in the NYTimes yesterday, I didn’t notice it was by out gay reporter Adam Nagourney. That changes nothing, really. Except maybe that his experience makes him more attuned to the topic: The conflicting signals from the White House about its commitment to gay issues reflect a broader paradox: even as cultural acceptance of homosexuality increases across the country, the politics of gay rights remains full of crosscurrents. It is...

LATER — Facing South tells us that at least two leaders of the coup were apparently trained at a controversial Department of Defense school based at Fort Benning, Georgia “infamous for producing graduates linked to torture, death squads and other human rights abuses.” NYTimes: The Honduran president, Manuel Zelaya, was ousted by the army on Sunday after pressing ahead with plans for a referendum that opponents said could lay the groundwork for his eventual re-election, in the first...

GAY PRIDE SUNDAY UPDATE: All Things Considered interviews Harris. I am 54 years old. I lived in NYC for 30 years, through the AIDS years. I lost a life-partner to the disease. My experience could not be more different than Harris’s. =============== A friend forwarded Mark Harris’s NYMag Summer Issue feature on the Gay Generation Gap as much for the mention of The DataLounge, a site from the company I once worked for, as for the text. An interesting premise, it might have been insightful....

Recently I noted Twitter hype punctured by a study that found Twitter users to be self-obsessed. Today Nicholas Carr points to New Scientest and a report that finds Wikipedians are generally “grumpy,” “disagreeable,” and “closed to new ideas.” Forget altruism: [T]he scholars paint a picture of Wikipedians as social maladapts who “feel more comfortable expressing themselves on the net than they do off-line” and who score poorly on measures of “agreeableness...

Tomorrow will be the 40th anniversary of the June 28, 1969 police raid of the Stonewall Inn bar in NYC’s Greenwich Village. On that day the drag queens, teenagers and street kids fought back in what is now generally considered to be the birth of the modern gay rights movement. Writing in Inside Higher Education, Scott McLemee asked scholars what they think (or hope) will have changed in LGBT scholarship by the 50th anniversary. His first scholar respondent, Doug Ireland (a journalist more than...

Narrowly: In a triumph for President Barack Obama, the Democratic-controlled House narrowly passed sweeping legislation Friday that calls for the nation’s first limits on pollution linked to global warming and aims to usher in a new era of cleaner, yet more costly energy. The vote was 219-212, capping months of negotiations and days of intense bargaining among Democrats. Republicans were overwhelmingly against the measure, arguing it would destroy jobs in the midst of a recession while burdening...

Today’s NYTimes has a piece on The Glory for Christ Football League, which came into being because Georgia is not one of the twenty-four states that allow homeshcoolers to join public- or private-school teams: By 2002, the sports-loving sons of Roger and Diana McDaniel had aged out of recreation league football. A school team was not an option. They had no school. The boys were educated at home, cracking open textbooks — English, math, Bible — about a first-down-marker’s length from...

GMA reported this morning that Google was “down for 40 minutes” on news of Jackson’s death. An overstatement, I suspected. Cnet clarifies in a comment from Google: Some Google users complained that the search engine’s News area was inaccessible for a time. A Google representative confirmed that “between approximately 2:40 p.m. PDT and 3:15 p.m. PDT today, some Google News users experienced difficulty accessing search results for queries related to Michael Jackson.” The...

TechCrunch: It was probably to be expected that Twitter would struggle as reportedly hundreds of thousands of tweets came in about Jackson in a very short amount of time. While I only got a couple actual Fail Whales, the site was really sucking wind for much of the hour that people were trying to get information about him. But Twitter was hardly the only site that was struggling. Various reports had the AOL-owned TMZ, which broke the story, being down at multiple points throughout the ordeal. As...

UPDATE II 9 a.m. – The State: Gov. Mark Sanford arrived in the Hartsfield-Jackson International Airport this morning, having wrapped up a seven-day visit to Buenos Aires, Argentina, he said. Sanford said he had not been hiking along the Appalachian Trail, as his staff said in a Tuesday statement to the media. He says he considered hiking the Appalachian Trail but chose, instead, to do something “exotic.” While there, he “drove along the coastline.” Incredible. UPDATE...

David Carr asks, How Good (or Not Evil) Is Google? His conclusion: As with most matters involving Google, it is less about the specific activity than the scope of it. A company with Google’s wherewithal and ambition may have the ability to eventually seem like the only choice in all manner of endeavors. The morning before I went to visit Google, I searched my Gmail to find my schedule and plugged it into my Google Calendar before pumping the address into Google Maps. I checked Google News to make...

Paul Lamere at Music Machinery: One of the ways that Music 2.0 has changed how we think about music is that there is so much interesting data available about how people are listening to music. Sites like Last.fm automatically track all sorts of interesting data that just was not available before. Forty years ago, a music label like Capitol would know how many copies the album Abbey Road sold in the U.S., but the label wouldn’t know how many times people actually listened to the album. Today,...

A few months back Siva Vaidhyanathan asked if anyone had ever used Google Street View for something important? He posted some of the interesting answers he got, but none was quite so newsworthy as this: A four story building collapsed in Brooklyn today, just before 2pm. The “Vesper Bar & Lounge” at 493 Myrtle Avenue is completely unrecognizable after the collapse, which saw no casualties and four minor injuries, according to early reports. The Bar was closed at the time and emergency services...

The NYTimes today looks at Why the Gay Rights Movement Has No National Leader: Until 1973, homosexuality was classified as a mental illness by the American Psychiatric Association. Today, same-sex couples can marry in six states. How did a group that has been so successful over the last generation in countering cultural prejudice and winning civil rights make it so far without an obvious leader? One explanation is that gay and lesbian activists learned early on that they could get along just fine...

The documentary on the food industry went into wider distribution this weekend. Critics agree — SEE IT! NY Magazine: After an hour and a half of sighing, wincing, and clucking over the manifold outrages portrayed in Robert Kenner’s Food, Inc., I gave up the thought of “reviewing” the documentary and decided, instead, to exhort you: See it. Bring your kids if you have them. Bring someone else’s kids if you don’t. The message is nothing new if you’ve read Eric Schlosser’s Fast...

Following up on yesterday morning’s post from Michael on the “breathtaking hypocrisy” of John Ensign things have heated up some today. ProPublica’s Robin Fields, brings us up to date: The fallout from an extramarital affair between Ensign and Cindy Hampton, a campaign staffer, is threatening to ensnare other Republican leaders as they try to marshal opposition to the Obama administration. A June 11 letter written by Hampton’s husband, published today in the Las Vegas...

Jack Shafer at Slate is doubting Twitter: Unlike several other technology-friendly journalists, I’ve found it more noise than signal in understanding the Iranian upheaval. I’m not saying that there is no signal to be found; I’m just saying that my cognitive colander isn’t big enough to strain out Iran information I can rely on…. I appreciate, as Atlantic Senior Editor Andrew Sullivan wrote in his blog, that many of the reports are “more about the mood than hard...

The White House: REMARKS BY THE PRESIDENT AT THE SIGNING OF A PRESIDENTIAL MEMORANDUM REGARDING FEDERAL BENEFITS AND NON-DISCRIMINATION Oval Office 6:04 P.M. EDT THE PRESIDENT: Well, today I’m proud to issue a presidential memorandum that paves the way for long-overdue progress in our nation’s pursuit of equality. Many of our government’s hard-working, dedicated, and patriotic public servants have long been denied basic rights that their colleagues enjoy for one simple reason...

In Iran, why didn’t they just turn Twitter off? From All Things Considered: Jonathan Zittrain, co-founder of the Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard Law School, says Iran uses a basic filtering architecture that has the average Internet connection piped through a government server farm before it goes anywhere else. But, like resourceful American students in search of Facebook, many Iranians can get around blocks. Complicating matters for the authorities, Zittrain says, is the...

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration released a report today on the effects we can expect that global climate change will have on the United States. Global Climate Change Impacts in the United States draws material from 13 US government science agencies. Ten key findings: Global warming is unequivocal and primarily human-induced Climate changes are underway in the United States and are projected to grow Widespread climate-related impacts are occurring now and are expected to increase Climate...